Engineering news
McClaren is one of the manufacturers opening its doors to students
A team of young girls have raced a three-wheeled car to victory in Westminster in a showcase event for the government's See Inside Manufacturing initiative.
The girls, from St Marylebone School in London, are taking part in the McLaren Manufacturing Challenge, which sees teams of students design and engineer a motor-less vehicle that can travel 10m in the fastest time possible. The finals will be held at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, Surrey, next month.
The contest is part of the See Inside Manufacturing scheme, in which companies open their doors to students aged 11 to 19 years in an attempt to challenge outdated views of the engineering profession.
The winning group's car was powered by the winding-up of elastic bands. Team member and year 10 product design GCSE student Salma Rami said that she had enjoyed the project. “It's fun, it's creative, and you get to experience things you've never experienced before,” she said.
Her teacher, Sally Barden, head of design and technology at the school, said that projects like this give students the chance to learn through discovery and be more experimental in their designs.
She added: “There is a real shortage of women in engineering and design professions. These projects plant an idea that a career in engineering is a possibility.”
Critics say that too much engineering is taught around fast cars and subjects that may not interest girls, and that better efforts could be made to entice them into careers in industry. University courses in biomedical engineering, for example, are particularly appealing to young women and can see up to half of places filled by them.
Business secretary Vince Cable admitted that the See Inside Manufacturing scheme could be angled a little differently to accommodate this. He said: “The problem is that far too few women do engineering – the figures are rather alarming. In half of all state schools there is not a single girl doing advanced-level physics. That is the barrier that we have to overcome.”
McLaren Automotive is one of the companies that has opened its doors to school kids as part of the scheme. Operations director, Alan Foster, said that there is a stigma around the perception of engineering of the “oily rag and bacon sandwich”. But the state-of-the-art and surgically clean McLaren factory in Woking takes girls visiting the facility by surprise.
He said: “You see the girls looking at the facility and saying it's not what they thought it would be. It's very clean, orderly, quiet, and there is real concentration. If we can help take people's breath away, that is amazing.”
Earlier this year the government announced that the See Inside Manufacturing initiative would expand to include 10 sectors of industry, up from three previously. The nuclear, oil and gas, offshore wind, construction, life sciences, electronics and chemicals industries will join the automotive, aerospace and food and drink sectors.